One Mistake
by Asidian
Summary: Maverick's plans for Barnaby took everything into consideration - with the exception of Kotetsu Kaburagi.


Author's Notes: I finished watching this series just recently and knew right away that I had to do a piece from Barnaby's pov about the absolute mindfuck Maverick put him through. I still don't think this does it justice, but I might come back to the concept later, if I think of another way to handle it.

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One Mistake

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Barnaby has a year to map it out.

He unpacks the lies, examines the intent – considers the events, and how they lined up just so, spiraling into one another like dominos before the whole flimsy structure comes down.

He has 365 mostly sleepless nights in his apartment to do it, staring at the wall, or the ceiling, or the darkness behind his own eyelids. With Kotetsu retired and his parents' murderer finally out of commission – actually gone this time, he keeps reassuring himself – he has nothing else to do to pass the long hours after sunset.

So he traces Maverick's plans like following creeping red lines below the skin, spreading out from an infected wound.

He works out the timing: when Maverick must have set it into motion, nudged his memories to glitch, insinuating a face where there had never been a face before.

He forces himself to count the days between the false recollection and his own public announcement. It felt like being flayed, the laying bare of such a private hurt. So many eyes peering into his personal nightmares were like insects crawling on his skin.

Looking back, Barnaby realizes he never even thought to tell Maverick no.

He has time, on those sleepless nights, to relive the moment when he learned the truth. At first, it drifts aimlessly in his thoughts, as swimmy and indistinct as a long-ago fire, half scrubbed out of him in a flash of blue brilliance. But the more he pries at it, the more it comes: Maverick's voice, calm and composed; hot tears on his own face; the shear immensity of the betrayal, too vast to comprehend.

Finally, after all of those, the helpless knowledge that everything would be stripped away again.

Objectively, Barnaby is almost impressed.

The thorough, diligent part of him recognizes how much thought it must have taken to coerce such an elaborate series of events into place. The part of him that makes to-do lists, that finishes his paperwork in a scrupulously legible hand, that keeps his apartment fastidiously clean – that part of him stands back in awe of how neatly Maverick tied up all the loose ends.

Almost tied up all the loose ends.

Because no matter how many times Barnaby chases around the thoughts in his own mind, he comes to the same conclusion: for all Maverick's painstaking efforts, he made one mistake.

One mistake that cost him everything, and left Barnaby here, in his own apartment, with his own mind mostly in one piece. Baranaby's no longer a slave to the man who killed his family and then pretended to be a father figure in the gaping hole they left behind, and he has Maverick's mistake to thank for all of that.

That mistake has a name, and an infuriating tendency to use embarrassing nicknames, and an easy smile that lights up his face.

That mistake is Kotetsu Kaburagi, and for 365 sleepless nights, Barnaby stares into the emptiness of his own apartment, and thinks about what could have been – what almost was – and his throat closes up, and it's hard to breathe.

It's no wonder Maverick underestimated his partner. Barnaby did, too, at first.

It's easy, when the clumsy exterior hides the competence underneath – when the rough words and sarcastic quips and thoughtless idiocy eclipse a selfless, earnest heart. It's easy to write him off as a stupid old man, right up until the day when he's so much more than that.

He _is_ so much more than that.

On some nights, Barnaby picks up the phone and dials the number to tell him so. His finger hovers over the call button, looking at his partner's childish prank photo.

"Thank you," he'll say to Kotetsu. He can't remember whether he ever said it, not in the chaos of that final battle, not in the surreal aftermath, overwhelmed with relief that his partner was still breathing.

If he said it, he knows for certain that he didn't say it enough.

But Barnaby never taps the button, and the phone stays silent, and his mouth stays closed. He stares up at the ceiling for the next sleepless night, trapped in his own thoughts.

When dawn finally comes, he drinks his coffee black, and thinks that Kotetsu would poke fun at him for it while dumping sugar and cream into his own cup.

Some mornings, staring down into the depths of his coffee, groggy from lack of rest – hours away from the mid-afternoon, when he will inevitably nod off over his laptop, exhausted – his sleep-addled mind posits the notion that Kotetsu isn't just Maverick's mistake.

But when the thought comes, and he begins to take umbrage at it, demanding of his own mind exactly what that's supposed to mean, no answer comes.

No answer continues to come, right up until the day Hero TV shows him an image of a man he thought was miles away, living a peaceful life in the countryside with his daughter. Right up until the day Barnaby puts on his suit for the first time in a year and catches Kotetsu in his arms before he crashes and burns.

In that moment, as Kotetsu takes his feet, as they fall into easy banter as though the distance and the time between them never happened at all, his answer comes.

In that moment of perfect clarity, he sees his own mistake – and knows there's still time to fix it.


End file.
